Prediction of Usage Probabilities of Shopping-Mall Corridors Using Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks
This work addresses corridor usage prediction for shopping-mall management, but it is incremental as it applies existing GNN techniques to a new domain with synthetic data.
The paper tackles predicting usage probabilities of shopping-mall corridors using a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) method, achieving results based on synthetic data generated from shop features and a probability model.
We present a method based on graph neural network (GNN) for prediction of probabilities of usage of shopping-mall corridors. The heterogeneous graph network of shops and corridor paths are obtained from floorplans of the malls by creating vector layers for corridors, shops and entrances. These are subsequently assimilated into nodes and edges of graphs. The prediction of the usage probability is based on the shop features, namely, the area and usage categories they fall into, and on the graph connecting these shops, corridor junctions and entrances by corridor paths. Though the presented method is applicable for training on datasets obtained from a field survey or from pedestrian-detecting sensors, the target data of the supervised deep-learning work flow in this work are obtained from a probability method. We also include a context-specific representation learning of latent features. The usage-probability prediction is made on each edge, which is a connection by a section of corridor path between the adjacent nodes representing the shops or corridor points. To create a feature for each edge, the hidden-layer feature vectors acquired in the message-passing GNN layers at the nodes of each edge are averaged and concatenated with the vector obtained by their multiplication. These edge-features are then passed to multilayer perceptrons (MLP) to make the final prediction of usage probability on each edge. The samples of synthetic learning dataset for each shopping mall are obtained by changing the shops' usage and area categories, and by subsequently feeding the graph into the probability model. When including different shopping malls in a single dataset, we also propose to consider graph-level features to inform the model with specific identifying features of each mall.